If you own a retail store, you can observe people while they shop. You can see how they enter, how they make their way around the store, whether they find what they’re looking for, and whether they get frustrated and leave. You can watch this user behavior–was someone unable to reach a garden hose on a top shelf, or were they able to get help when they needed it–so that you can streamline your store layout, improve the customer experience, and generate more business.
Imagine a tool where you could literally watch user behavior on your website firsthand, just like in this retail store example. Every click, scroll, and hover. Sounds amazing and super helpful, right?
While Google Analytics is a powerful tool, it doesn’t go the extra step of showing you EXACTLY how users are interacting on your website. However, there’s a tool that does this and it’s called Microsoft Clarity.
What is Microsoft Clarity? Great question! Clarity is a free marketing analytics tool and has become one of our go-to tools for real-time insights that GA4 can’t provide. Did I mention it’s absolutely free?
Clarity monitors your visitor’s every move, keeping you in the loop on the who, what, when, where, and how of user interactions. With Clarity, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of your visitors’ experience as they explore your digital domain.
If you’re trying to gain a deeper understanding of user behavior on your website beyond Google Analytics, then Clarity is for you. Here are three things that GA4 can’t tell you, but Microsoft Clarity can:
Catch What GA4 Can’t with Microsoft Clarity’s Session Recordings
Google Analytics is great for giving you the numbers – page views, engagement rates, conversion metrics – but it often falls short when it comes to showing you what those numbers actually mean in terms of user experience. Sure, GA4 can tell you how many users visited a page or clicked a button, but it can't show you exactly how they interacted with your site or what they were really doing during their visit.
This is where Microsoft Clarity comes in. Unlike GA4, Clarity lets you view session recordings so you can watch users as they navigate your website in real-time. It’s very similar to watching an iPhone screen recording. With session recordings, you can spot where visitors hesitate, struggle, or abandon the page–allowing you to make data-driven adjustments to improve conversions and reduce bounce rates.
Understand User Click Patterns and Uncover Frustrations with Clarity
GA4 can’t differentiate between successful interactions and clicks that lead to dead ends. However, Microsoft Clarity can by offering dead click detection.
This is a feature that shows when users are clicking on elements that don’t respond. Whether it’s an unresponsive button or an image they think is clickable (but isn’t), dead clicks reveal points of frustration that GA4 overlooks.
Along with dead clicks, Clarity offers a few more helpful metrics to help optimize your page:
- Excessive scrolling: if a user session has higher amounts of vertical scrolling than average, then it will be flagged as excessive scrolling. Excessive scrolling could indicate UX issues, poor content relevance, discovery, or nonstandard site interactions.
- Rage clicks: if a user clicks rapidly in a clustered area, these clicks are marked as a rage click. This can indicate user frustration if they are trying to interact with an element on your page and cannot reach it, or that their expectation is that a non-clickable element on the page should be interactive
- Quick backs: a quick back is a click that leads users away from the current page to another website. If the user doesn’t find the navigation useful and returns to the original page or website in a certain amount of time, Clarity detects this as a quick back.
Clarity’s level of user insight means you’re not just getting access to metrics like engagement rates or exit rates. The ability to spot and resolve these seemingly small issues will help optimize your website to its full potential. You can also view these metrics in a click heatmap, which we’ll touch on in the next point.
How Clarity Identifies Pain Points
Microsoft Clarity is all about the visuals, and website heatmaps are a great example of one among the many of visual tools Clarity provides for data analysis.
In Clarity, you can create a few types of instant heatmaps:
- Scroll heatmaps: These are an excellent way for you to address pain points and improve site usability. GA4 can only track scrolling if a user scrolls 90% down the page, whereas Clarity tracks all scrolls on your page. Are they abandoning the page halfway? Clarity will tell you. Are they missing key calls to action or important information buried in the middle of the page? You'll know, and then you can improve the layout of the page.
- Click heatmaps: Need to understand engagement on a page? As mentioned in my previous point, Clarity provides a couple of click metric options to help optimize your page: rage clicks, dead clicks, and quick backs. You can view these clicks in a heatmap. Each click a user has made will be assigned a number, and by clicking on that number you can see exactly how many users clicked in a particular spot. For example, on our page, the ‘CONTACT’ button is our most clicked button during the specificed date range and therefore has been labeled as ‘1’. During our date range, 6 users have clicked on our ‘CONTANT’ button.
- Area heatmaps: Similar to click heatmaps, these allow you to view metrics in any given area on the page as opposed to the entire page. For example, if you only wanted to view the top half of your page, you could select it and view data for that specific area. This is very handy for focusing your improvements on the areas that need it most.
When using Clarity in our client work, we’ve noticed that on some landing pages, information placed at the bottom of landing pages was receiving more attention as opposed to the top. To enhance visibility and user experience, we relocated this content higher up on the page, allowing users to quickly find and access details without the need for digging.
Clarity can also give you an AI generated summary of your heatmaps and where improvements can be made!
Is Clarity a Valuable Google Analytics Alternative?
In short, no. You’ll still want to use Google Analytics. However, if you’re looking to expand your understanding with additional website analytics tools, Microsoft Clarity should be your first stop.
We love GA4, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. By adding Clarity, with its powerful features like session recordings, website heatmaps, and click detection, you’ll understand the bigger picture behind user behavior on your website.
By integrating Clarity into your marketing analytics strategy, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of what’s working and where improvements are needed.
Understanding your website traffic is the cornerstone to getting critical insights, improving customer experience, and generating more business online. If you need help optimizing your website analytics and reporting so you can start generating more leads, reach out today to one of our analytics experts today.
Having earned a marketing degree in December of 2023, Roslyn blends a passion for creative marketing with a keen interest in the psychological aspects that drive consumer behavior. When not diving into the latest trends in marketing, Roslyn enjoys discovering new music, though Taylor Swift remains a constant favorite! As a Southern Maine native, the coast is her favorite place to be. Whether it's a warm day on Wells Beach or hiking scenic trails, she loves spending time outdoors. With college now in the rearview, she is eager to travel and begin new adventures. Driven by a curious mind, Roslyn is ready to immerse herself into the world of marketing!